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> and they are also making it infeasible (in most cases) to transpile BigInt code to fallback code using Babel or similar tools. That doesn't sound like a reco

• tzs 7y ago
  Yeah. The recommendation is to write your code now making explicit calls to a specific bigint library. Later, when the JavaScript in the browsers you need to target has built in bigint support, Babel can replace your library calls with code that uses the built in bigints. For this to work, you need a library whose bigint behavior either exactly matches the built in implementation, or whose deviations are known and can reasonably be account for when translating to built in bigints. The library they recommend is a JavaScript translation of their implementation of built in bigints, so should match numerically what the built in implementation does. There may be other libraries that would be suitable, but it would be nice if everyone agreed on just one for this so that when the time comes to use Babel or similar to replace the library calls with use of the built ins, it only has to deal with one library.
• acdha 7y ago
  Note the comma: I was specifically referring to the advice against attempting to polyfill it. The Babel reference was attempting to convey the idea that instead you need something on the same order of complexity as a compiler to do this properly, but the details about JSBI are why I linked to their writeup rather than trying to summarize it.